'If I were forced to choose a delusion to believe in, I think I would go for UFOlogy'

by Polly Toynbee

In a world of scientific miracle and wonderment, why do more and more people believe in magic? Our screens have been hit by alien monstrosities from the irrational world - a host of programmes on the paranormal, which is treated as if it were a truth on a par with any other natural phenomena.

Now the BBC's Community Programme Unit has jumped in, an unsuitable stable to produce a new series, Secrets of the Paranormal (Thursday BBC2). Before we know it, the Natural History Unit will be bringing us ghosts and a1iens too. What sparked all this off? Could it be the phenomenal success of The X-Files?

Here is the catalogue of recent nonsense in this vein. There was Michael Aspel's Strange but True. This took tales of the bizarre very seriously indeed. So seriously in fact, that my usually robust ten-year-old had nightmares about phantom hitchhikers and the like for weeks afterwards. "But it's true!" he kept saying, when I told him there were no such things as ghosts. He was far more persuaded by the evidence of his own eyes on the television screen than by any sensible argument I could offer. "I saw people who it happened to!" he insisted. "Oh no it didn't, they imagined it," I said. He answered: "That's just as scary because I might imagine up a ghost too!" There was no answer to this . Aspel brought us strange identical twins, UFOs, poltergeists and a woman protected by a "presence" for two lost days in the Cairngorms.

Then we had Schofields Quest, inviting the public to solove paranormal mysteries. Beyond Belief was a well titled programme, but there its merit ceased. Sir David Frost and Uri Geller offered us examples of the paranormal, with help from Britains leading psychic healer Matthew Manning. Surely that was enough? Apparently not. Paul McKenna brought us a "factual" series on weird and repulsive phenomena (the Russian self-hypnotist who can pull trains with his penis when in a trance). This is perhaps more abnormal than paranormal.

So, in jumps the Community Programme Unit with Secrets of the Paranormal, its own tales of the unexpected. This week - UFOs, the truth the Ministry of Defence tries to hide, from a woman UFOlogist.

If I were forced to choose a delusion though, I think I would go for UFOlogy. There is something so entrancing about the fantasy that nicer, more intelligent little grey men from space inspect us, watch over us and wait for us to become as civilised as they. In America four million people think they have been abducted by aliens - that is four million seriously deluded people. This mass delusion is now crossing the Atlantic and growing numbers here are convinced that the little men have swept them up for medical inspections in flying saucers. Uncritical television programmes that let such people loose on the airwaves only encourage the dissemination of this stuff. This, it must be said, does not conform to the BBC's Mission to Explain. Inside the mighty portals of Broadcasting House emblazoned the words, "Nation shall speak peace unto nation". It doesn't say anything about nation speaking peace unto aliens.

The question is why do people want and need to believe all this? The more we know and understand about the natural world the more people flock to the supernatural. The more we know about astronomy, the more people rush to astrology. As we roll back the frontiers of medicine and cure ever more diseases, more people plunge into homeopathy, reflexology and a host of other non scientific treatments, although I've seen little scientific evidence of their healing power.

Scientific knowledge and the scientific habits of thought are now the repository of a select group of people increasingly set apart from the rest of us. Most of us cannot understand most of what is going on in science. We know the phrases theory of relativity, black holes and chaos theory, but we do not know their meaning. For most of us, as long as the electricity flows in from the light switch, the video works and the plane flies we need not bother with the how and why. But we do need to participate in the rational thought processes that science springs from. It makes no sense to live in an intellectual world constructed by reason when our beliefs are stuck in the Middle Ages. The human brain rolls back the frontiers of ignorance and conquers the dark forces of stupidity. So why do we tolerate so much creeping foolishness, undoing the reasoning work of centuries? We imply that the belief system of superstition is as worthy of serious consideration as the factual world of science. In the end, will deviding our brains into two mental conditions, centuries apart, drive us all mad?

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